Shaping Interactive Media with the Sewing Machine: Smart Textile as an Artistic Context to Engage Girls in Technology and Engineering Education

Aims And Objectives

Technology is blurring the disciplines of arts, design, computer science and engineering, crossing the borders of curricula. Rather than using technology in art education the aim of the underlying approach of integrated arts-science and technology in education is to understand technology as aesthetic experience through artistic processes – as opposed to simply using technology for art education purposes. McCarthy and Wright (2004) have mapped technology as lived experience. Dewey has argued in Art as Experience that any experience is an aesthetic experience perceived through the human senses in the very sense of the Latin term of Aisthesis (Reimann, 2010). The research project aims to bridge the gap between arts, design, sciences and technology by integrating artistic processes in technology and engineering education. It aims to contribute to the development of a transdisciplinary research approach to Smart Textile technologies and to generate transdisciplinary research methodologies to integrate the education through arts approach the curriculum.The research aims to improve the integrated arts-science-technology education to support girls interest and understanding of technology in order to contribute to the generation of a wider gender- and art-oriented curriculum and teaching culture in technology and engineering education.